N Korea Crisis May Actually Create U.S. Bond

by Franz Schurmann

Image from N Korea web site

Since the Korean War, both North Korea and China described their friendship as "closer than the lips and the teeth." Some 180,000 Chinese "people's volunteers" crossed into Korea and sent the American 8th Army into retreat during the war. Chinese generals signed the armistice documents along with their North Korean comrades.

But something started changing between China and North Korea at the end of the 1980s. During the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing, South Korean citizens bought a big chunk of the tickets and were not prevented from attending by anti-communist South Korean officials. Two years later, South Korea and China established diplomatic relations with each other, with the former dutifully breaking its ties with Taiwan. This move brought about a political earthquake in Northeast Asia, as the high walls separating democratic and communist states began to crumble.

With democratic South Korea as a springboard, China's Deng Xiaoping saw a great window of opportunity for China to escape its image of being little more than a jumbo-size communist dictatorship. South Korean investors poured into China, many of them establishing firms not far from the North Korean border, among China's large Korean minority.

But North Korean "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung decided he too wanted to get rid of North Korea's image of being a midget-size communist dictatorship that couldn't give even its own people a decent life. He initiated a vast economic development project based on free market principles in North Korea's thinly populated northeastern region. The "Tumen River Project" got the support of the United Nations, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and Mongolia. But the United States decided not to throw its weight (and money) behind a multilateral project and it died with Kim Il-Sung in 1994.

During his eight years in power, the Great Leader's successor, his son Kim Jong-Il has seen his country hurtling downhill. North Koreans have been living under famine conditions for several years now. Food aid, especially from America, has helped ward off starvation. But what worries Kim Jong-Il the most is that his last "friend," China, may be turning against him.

During this new century alone, some 300,000 North Koreans have fled to China across the Yalu River. At first the Chinese authorities tolerated the refugees. But when they crashed into foreign embassies and consulates seeking sanctuary and eventual extradition to South Korea, Chinese patience snapped. A last straw now seems finally to have separated North Korean lips from Chinese teeth.

Last year Kim Jong-Il decided to revive the Tumen River Project, but entirely within North Korean territory. Apparently without consulting the Chinese authorities, Kim Jong-Il asked a very wealthy Chinese businessman of Dutch citizenship named Yang Bin to become the CEO of the project, now renamed the Sunuiju Project. Yang Bin, one of the world's chief orchid producers, had previously built a Dutch theme park in Shenyang, in northeast China.

Suddenly last October, the Shenyang police arrested Yang Bin and charged him with tax evasion. Just as the North Korean nuclear crisis hit the media, the Chinese authorities leaked to Seoul newspapers that he would soon be convicted and expelled from China, thereby grounding the Sunuiju Project. China will never renounce its mutual defense treaty with North Korea. But it is signaling the Dear Leader that if he does not grow up fast, he may not last long in power.

Kim Jong-Il knows he cannot play off China against America because relations between the latter two are closer than ever, with the FBI opening an office in Beijing. Showing which way the wind was blowing, a high-ranking South Korean official was quoted in the Singapore-based Lianhe Zaobao newspaper as saying, "China and South Korea are working together to put pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear weapons project."

Kim Jong-Il knows he has to make a dramatic move, not just to save himself, but his country as well. If America bombs North Korea's nuclear facilities, chaos could erupt over the entire Korean peninsula, a subject that was discussed at the recent meeting at the Crawford Ranch between presidents Bush and Jiang Zemin. Already anti-American sentiment is rising in South Korea.

Some writers, like the New York Times' William Safire, are calling for American forces to be pulled out of South Korea. But the Chinese, for many years now, wanted these forces to be kept in South Korea as a force for stability on the Korean peninsula. Despite the tough talk from Washington, there is little talk of regime change in Pyongyang. In June 2002, President Bush was readying a dialogue with Pyongyang even though, six months earlier, he had branded North Korea as part of an "evil axis."

The Tumen River Project and its successor the Sinuiju Project are vital to North Korea's survival and hope. North Korea needs America to make this project fly. If America decides, through diplomacy, to see if it could become a friend to the North Korean people, that would be a significant counterweight to South Korea's growing anti-Americanism. And East Asia, which is the global economy's main locomotive, could keep chugging along.